“There’s obviously a drumbeat that is banging louder and louder that we want a female lead superhero [film]. [W]e have strong female characters in our films from Black Widow to Pepper Potts to Peggy Carter and you never know. Maybe there’s an offshoot film with one of them. Or Captain Marvel, you know?

“It’s hard, because we have a small group at Marvel. We do two films a year. To get those two films done and to do them right takes a lot of work and manpower. And female-power, obviously. To add a third film and to just put it in the slate right now is difficult. We have these next three, four, five films coming out and that’s what we’re really concentrating on.”

One if the Marvel Universe’s mightiest superheroes, Carol Danvers is an air force pilot who has Kree powers similar to the the Captain Marvel thanks to a misadventure too complicated to summarise. After originally operating under the name Ms Marvel and leading the Avengers for a time, she adopted the name Captain Marvel (along with a less exploitative costume).

Katee Sackhoff as Kara ‘Starbuck’ Thrace in Battlestar Galactica

Battlestar Galactica and Riddick as-kicker Katee Sackhoff, the woman at the centre of Ms Marvel/Captain Marvel rumours, was asked outright if she’d been in meetings with Marvel on the Schmoes Know podcast, and she’ fudged the answer a bit, saying, “”Um… There’s been some stuff going on.

“Um… there’s been a lot of checking of availability… I don’t quite know exactly… I don’t know… there’s been a lot of questions about the first quarter of next year.”